The Cafes » Macs

John C. Welch has a nice article in Information Week in which he compares Mac OS X to Vista, and Vista comes out much the loser. This is no great surprise, especially since he focuses on UI issues. This is like comparing a Toyota Camry to a car built by UNM engineering students for the Formula Society of Automotive Engineers competition. Sure, it’s cool that the undergrads can build a car in a couple of semesters, but you wouldn’t put the student car in your driveway to commute to work.

However, what struck me was how many of Welch’s examples of how things were easier on Mac OS X, were easier only by comparison to the even poorer Vista. Many of his examples are actions that non-geeks are not able to accomplish on Mac OS X. They are harder than they need to be be, and harder than they should be. For example,
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In the good old days of Mac OS 6, 7, 8, and 9, it was possible to automatically mount network drives at startup. This no longer seems to work in Mac OS X. There’s no longer a little box you can check when mounting a network drive to say, “items will be opened at system startup time”. You can still do this, but it takes a little more work. Here’s how:
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Have you ever taken 173 pictures of your dog and wanted to quickly set the title of each one to “Spot playing”? That is, have you ever wanted to add the same title to several pictures at once in iPhoto? You can shift-click and command-click to select multiple pictures but as soon as you do that the Title field disappears so you can’t change any titles.

It is possible to do this though. However the option is a little hidden. (more…)

I’ve been thinking about getting an Intel Mac to replace the old Linux box that serves this site. However, a lot of software hasn’t been ported yet, and Rosetta emulation is slow. How much server relevant software is yet native?

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Friday I spent most of the day converting the old custom written site into a new spiffy WordPress 2.0 site. Why I did that was outlined in my previous post, Why Mokka mit Schlag?

Then I promptly caught writer’s block. For a good 48 hours I could think of absolutely nothing to say here. I could have pulled an old article out of the vault, but I wanted to relaunch with something new. So I went on a parrot walk at Brooklyn College, did a little owling in Prospect Park, and got to work on my notes for Macintosh Development with Java at Software Development 2006 in Santa Clara in March. This is a revised version of the Macifying SWT talk I gave at EclipseCon in New York in the Fall. However, this time the focus will be on Swing rather than the SWT. (Swing does a much better job at handling the Mac.)
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